EasySponsorship Archive

Just over a year ago Conde Nast acquired the tech blog and community site Ars Technica for about $25 million.  Yesterday Ars Technica launched a paid subscription option named “Premier”.  This new paid service costs $50/year and includes a variety of features including ad-free browsing and premier-only content. Other features include:

• premier-only chats
• full-text feed RSS
• downloadable pdf option for longer stories and one-page reading

Could it be?? Is Ars the first major tech site to charge for full RSS feeds? Could my post about RSS for $1 finally be gaining some forward momentum? What does Dave Winer think about this?

It’s a good move for Ars to test the waters with a paid subscription option. When Ars was acquired I noted that they weren’t acquired for the blog component but rather for the very strong community. Most of the larger blogs are trying different options to increase revenue for their respective companies. Techcrunch and VentureBeat runs conferences, Readwriteweb sells reports, Gigaom sells a pro subscription and runs conferences, and Mashable holds events. Revenue diversification is nearly always a good thing — especially as online advertising continues to struggle.

Steven Hodson has more on the Ars Premier launch.

Below are four of the newest startups according to Killer Startups for the spooky period ending October 31, 2007. Check out previous Killer Startups posts.

IsIt20.com – Applying 2.0ness to The Real World

You hear Web 2.0 everywhere you turn these days. IsIt20.com decided to take the term and apply it to real life, and real life people, places, and objects. IsIt20.com is a site where you can rate the 2.0ness of a large variety of things. IsIt20.com has many different categories such as; objects, humans, animals, countries, food, and houses. You rate these things out of 5 stars and you can comment on the 2.0ness. read more »

Movavi.com – Movavi Online – Convert All Video Formats

Movavi Online is a mutli-feature online video conversion tool. To begin with, you can use Movavi to download clips from YouTube and other video-sharing communities, and save them to your iPod or mobile device. Naturally, the site lets you convert these videos, but the output format is not limited to just those formats which are compatible with iPods and cell phones; you can convert all popular video formats (AVI, MOV, FLV, MPEG, MP4, and 3PG), in addition to various iPod and cellular phone formats. read more »

Brijit.com – Find Articles That Interest You

Are you finding it hard to keep up with your magazine subscriptions? Does it seem like there is no time to read interesting articles? Brijit.com can help you prioritize the articles you do read by allowing you to browse through article abstracts. Brijit.com gives 100 word abstracts on articles from Time Magazine, The Economist, The new Yorker, and other accredited magazines. Writers submit abstracts to Brijit.com and the best once are posted. read more »

EasySponsorship.com – Cause Websites Collect Donations

Fundraising is a multi-step endeavor that relies a lot on awareness and ease of donating. Many organizations could be readily collecting funds, but without a general bank account, the options for donations are limited. EasySponsorship.com offers organizations and individual fundraising groups to set up an account and webpage for their cause for free. After registering, users can create a personalized webpage with its own URL to share with friends, family and other contacts. read more »

Altlaw.org – Legal Information for the People

Why go through the bother of going to law school, if all the information you need to know about the law is available on Altlaw? Well, maybe it’s not the same thing, but Altlaw is definitely a good source of factual information from court cases and legal opinions dating back fifteen years. The website has a searchable database of federal appellate and Supreme Court opinions (no state court cases yet). read more »